INSURANCE giant Prudential has a nice, newly-coined word for us this week in "pre-heritance".

It's used to explain how the younger generation, just starting out as adults, are more and more clamouring for (and being given) an early advance on what they might expect to inherit from their parents.

You can, according to your temperament, interpret this as just one more indication of the "live now pay later" tendency of today's late teens and twenty-somethings.

Or, less pessimistically, you might take a wider view and conclude that, certainly in terms of the housing market, there is a strange cycle and a rough common justice being meted out here.

In the Sixties it was possible to buy a house for a fraction of what a car costs now. People of that generation made a big profit out of buying their own home.

Focusing on the over-fifties, the Prudential estimates that they netted an equity of £570bn. Small wonder that when polled a high proportion - 82% - were prepared to plough some of that back into their children's future during their own lifetime.

And just over half of those were prepared to consider releasing some equity from their home in order to help their children or even their grandchildren.

It makes sense to help a new generation which is finding it difficult to get a foot on the housing ladder - along with other things like wedding costs plus the education burden imposed by tuition fees.

It makes sense for the parents for whom helping now can be a means of side-stepping unnecessary inheritance tax - caused because rising house prices have pushed increasing numbers of people above the inheritance tax threshold and made them liable to a 40% tax on anything over £263,000.

The Prudential figures we will hear a lot more about pre-heritance which is due to become a much more common phenomenon.

By coincidence, the latest edition of Collins English Dictionary, out this week, boasts among its new buzzwords the acronym "kippers", which it defines as "kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings".

As someone before said memorably, we may be getting poorer but on the way we are acquiring a splendid new vocabulary.